Archive for February, 2008

More news from kuler (kuler.adobe.com), an Adobe web-hosted application for exploring, creating and sharing color harmonies. A new version of kuler desktop is now available, to accompany the official release of AIR , the Adobe development platform to deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop. The Emerging Creative Technologies (ECT) team at Adobe is excited to support the AIR development platform and to extend the current kuler functionality of RSS feeds.

New features include (Feature Guide below:

Browse color themes from the kuler website while offline (up to 100 themes cached per feed)

Drag and drop themes onto your own desktop as transparent “tear offs,” which can be scaled and viewed over any application

Engage 2008—held in San Francisco on February 25, 2008—is Adobe’s annual conversation on the future of applications and the web, bringing together key thought leaders and influencers to share perspectives from a broad spectrum of industries. In this video, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and CTO Kevin Lynch begin the dialog and show you what’s coming next from Adobe.

Adobe AIR just went 1.0. As the official Adobe spokesperson for AIR in Canada, I’ve been busy doing over/interviews with journalists across the country in preparation for the AIR launch.. and it’s finally here!

With the announcement, Adobe also added to the already impressive list of customers (eBay, AOL, FedEx, Nasdaq, SAP to name a few). Newcomers include The New York Times, BBC, and Deutsche Bank. Pretty darn impressive for a 1.0 product (whatever happened to waiting for the first service pack, or a 1.1 update??)

Also, Adobe Flex 3, the free open source framework for RIA development, moved from beta to production.. so all in all, a super exciting time to be at Adobe (or to be an Adobe customer)!

This is a somewhat random post – definitely not related to Adobe technology, but definitely related to an Adobe employee.

I initially heard about the movie ‘Once‘ from my wife when she saw the premiere at Sundance last year (I was working the festival, and my wife Kaniz came along for the fun), which just won the best song Oscar tonight. So even though the movie has been out for some time, I didn’t actually get to watch it until a month ago. Imagine my surprise when I saw Kyle Thompson, a fellow Adobe SE, moonlighting as the lead actor under the name ‘Glen Hansard’.

Now, I’m sure that Kyle will deny this.. but for your consideration, I submit Exhibit A (a promotional picture of ‘Glen’ for the movie):

Have you checked out MTV Remix yet? The site lets users produce their own music videos for various artists using on a collection of video clips, graphics, transitions, etc. The tunes are courtesy of the musicians, the graphics are probably courtesy of MTV, but the technology is all Adobe. The Remix site is actually one rendition of several online of Adobe Premiere Express.

If you’re interested in checking out a live online seminar on the topic, there’s one happening on February 27th – go to the Adobe event registration page for more information.

Here is some more detail from the invite:

Join us to learn how entertainment and media companies such as MTV, YouTube, and Photobucket are generating more advertising revenue and creating fun, interactive user experiences on the web with Premiere Express, Adobe’s popular online video editing application. With Adobe® Premiere® Express, anyone can make videos that rock in minutes.

Let your site’s users reorder, split, and trim video clips; add music, transitions, and titles; and then make it all their own with a mix of favorite photos, graphics, and animation. Adobe Premiere Express is an easy-to-use, Flash-based, cross-platform application that gives users the ability to mash up and remix user-generated, professionally produced, and branded content, while extending advertising and sponsorship opportunities and keeping your audience engaged longer and returning more often through contests, promotions, viral campaigns, and more.

This eSeminar will feature a guest speaker from MTV Networks to discuss how Premiere Express is used for their remix.mtv.com website.

In case you missed it, Adobe released a brand new version of Director last night at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. The official press release can be found here, or you can review the product page to read up on what’s new in this release.

From the product page, here’s a quick list of top features:

Support for more than 40 video, audio, and image file formats

Native 3D rendering with DirectX 9 support

Advanced physics with the included AGEIA™ PhysX™ engine

Support for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional software and video created with Flash

Unicode support, including multimode publishing

Enhanced text rendering engine

Enhanced user interface

Enhanced Script Browser and full JavaScript support

Bitmap filters

Xtra plug-ins

The ones I’m most excited about are the support for Flash CS3 and the new AGEIA PhysX engine. Check out the AGEIA site for more info on the PhysX engine.

In my role, I have a lot of tips and tricks land in my Inbox, courtesy of other Adobe employees much smarter than me.. so thought I would start sharing some of this extremely useful knowledge.

Here’s one from today on the Adobe Updater, which I’m sure most of you have come to – how should I say it – fall out of love with. Anyway, to avoid having the updater run all the time (the default is every week, but it sure feels like it’s a lot more often), launch the Adobe Updater application, bring up the app’s Preferences and either deselect automatic updates or select only the applications you’re interested in updating: